RESUMO
A retrospective survey of prescribing patterns in 10 church-owned primary healthcare (PHC) institutions in Dar es Salaam region, Tanzania, was carried out by trained research assistants in order to assess the prescribing practices of healthcare providers in these institutions. From a total of 15,000 prescriptions, 600 were recorded randomly from patient registers retrospectively. This work was carried out between April to September 1996. Each prescription was recorded using World Health Organization Action Programme on Essential Drugs (WHO/DAP) forms and analysed manually. The average number of drugs per prescription was 2.9; the percentage encounters for injections and antibiotics was 38 and 71, respectively. Ninety-four per cent of all drugs were prescribed according to the essential drug list of Tanzania.